Director • Adapter • Artistic Director

I make work that honors the logic of the text and celebrates the alchemy of spectatorship; that harnesses the tension of reality and metaphor unfolding simultaneously before an audience; that is formed of equal parts structure and spirit.

An engineer by training, I am fascinated by systems: by the ways in which facts and rules produce behavior. And so, at the beginning of a process, I set out to engineer the world of the play with my collaborators. Together we attempt to excavate every possible clue from the words on the page, and articulate a set of rules that captures the play’s dynamics. Rules produce order and necessity, and so give us a way to start. But at some point in every process, logic falls short; I start longing and looking for the magic made possible by collective imagination.

I believe that collective imagination is a radical act, because without envisioning alternative worlds, we cannot possibly create them. And so I treat the theatre as a gymnasium for the imagination by making work that presents an audience with opportunities to make-believe: to know that something is not real and nevertheless choose to believe in its reality. I believe this choice is most meaningful when it is presented most honestly, and so I make work that owns up to and delights in its artifice.

I believe that waking people up to the possibility of wonder where they’d never expected it is a tremendous gift. And so I make work that reveals the extraordinary potential of ordinary objects and gestures by imbuing them with symbolic meaning and using them in surprising and delightful ways. I believe this revelation is most meaningful when its origins are most ordinary, and so I create economical spectacle from humble materials.

I believe that attention is our most precious resource. After all, it is possible to give one’s time while withholding one’s attention. And so, above all, I strive to create work that rewards its spectators for their attention with experiences that can only come into being through their willingness – their eagerness – to conjure another reality together.